Editorial: Irish duplicity on foreign affairs, flattering America while being a tax haven and supporting leftist global cases, has been highlighted in a timely report by the think tank Policy Exchange

It is hard to think of a time in most people’s living memory when an Irish head of state has got off to an immediate bad relationship with unionists.

Previous incumbents of Áras an Uachtaráin, the residence of the Irish president, have been anathema to unionists in Northern Ireland, not least Éamon de Valera, who took up post in the 1950s. And the outgoing president Michael D Higgins, while he liked to praise himself for his supposed reconciliatory work, was also a scolding anglophobe.

But the latest president, Catherine Connolly, has shown that she will be a partisan Irish republican before she is formally in the role.

It could have been said that Ms Connolly was emphasising her nationalist credentials to get elected, but on Wednesday she travelled to an Irish language event in Belfast, to a rapturous reception, at a time when republican agitating and grievance mongering over Gaelic is greater than it has ever been north of the border.

It is fitting that Policy Exchange, the think tank based in Westminster, today flags up the anti western values of the political establishment in Dublin. This is a culture in which there is overwhelming support for an international legal action against Israel led by the corrupt and racist South African government. It is a politics that always cosies up to America while striking international left-wing poses then, hypocritically, is a tax haven for ultra rich firms.

And it is a society which, as the latest Policy Exchange report details, freeloads on defence while proclaiming its high-minded neutrality.

Policy Exchange has cited some comments of President-Elect Connolly: that Ireland “certainly cannot trust” the US, that Hamas are “part of the Fabric of the Palestinian people,” that the US is an “imperial power” contributing to “a very volatile situation in the world,” and that “Nato has played a despicable role in ... engaging in warmongering” re Russia.